>> I'm still waiting to see hard evidence that "millions of people 
>> actually do use templates without Word crashing".
> 
> Well most of the people in my company worldwide use our standard 
> corporate templates, as did everyone at the previous company I worked 
> for.  Plus everything I've seen coming out of companies like Nokia, Sony 
> Ericson, BMW, Ford, Daimler is in standard format - I *highly* doubt 
> they have not used templates to create these documents.  That's probably 
> well over a million people using templates in just the area of industry 
> I work in.  Do you really think all these people would use templates if 
> they were always prone to crashing?

Well we churn out seemingly identical documents every month. Word 
crashes quite a lot, but the poor souls using it just start again. And 
again. And again. Until eventually they get to the finished product. All 
the reports look identical because a dedicated team scrutinises every 
individual page, line by line, before the document is allowed to be 
released. (This has nothing to do with Word - the regulations require 
such scrutiny to check that there are no erroneous statements or 
ambiguities in the text.)

Presumably Word crashes like hell for everybody else too, and they just 
work around it.

>> Spending many, many hours correcting formatting glitches *is* 
>> practically their entire job description.
> 
> So surely they should have been on numerous training courses to get the 
> absolute maximum out of Word as efficiently as possible?  But they don't 
> know how to use styles?  I still can't believe that.

Training? You think the company I work for offers TRAINING? Have you not 
been reading lately? ;-)

>> But I've never seen them attempt to use styles...]
> 
> Why don't you teach them?

Because *I* can't get Word styles to work either?

(Last time I tried it, my copy of Word ended up permanently broken until 
I erased my normal template and deleted a chunk of my per-user registry.)

> It will save them hours of work - per day!

I can see that happening - I mean, if styles could be made to be 
reliable and stuff...

> Really, are they manually setting the font size, alignment, style etc 
> for EVERY single heading/subheading/caption in every document?  What a 
> complete and utter waste of time.

Well no, they start with a blank report document that contains all the 
section headings and standard text, already formatted. Then they change 
all the appropriate fields, insert the data for this specific project, 
etc., and then clean up all the formatting that breaks in the process.

>> Seems to me they're all just resigned to the fact that Word is 
>> horribly awkward to use? *shrugs*
> 
> But it just smacks of complete incompetence when a) they should have 
> been trained for this if it's their main job, and b) they don't ask 
> anyone if there's a more efficient way to do it.  Especially when there 
> usually *is* a more efficient way than just typing as if it is wordpad.

Training? I won't argue with that one.

As to whether it's possible to use Word efficiently, I'm not so sure. 
But I imagine it could probably be _more_ efficient than what they 
currently do, sure.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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